


guess that we were too much of the same kind

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Family, Family History, Family Trees, Loneliness, Nostalgia, Other, Siblings, dad issues, did i ask for this life, hospital blues, parentdale, why am i such a hoe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 12:57:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11967873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: By week two in hospital Fred can tell his visitors apart by the way they hold his hand.





	guess that we were too much of the same kind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ronnieandcher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ronnieandcher/gifts).



> a token of my love to emily for putting up with my tracing and re-tracing of the andrews family tree

 

By week two in hospital Fred can tell his visitors apart by the way they hold his hand, and they all do, maybe because he looks too fragile for hugs, maybe because they’re trying to force strength into him by their joined palms. Maybe they want reassurance he’s alive. If he can, he squeezes back. 

He still can't bathe himself, can’t walk without assistance, but he's managed to develop an entirely new skill set in his time here: the unvarying psychic ability to tell his neighbours and family apart only by touch.   
  
Archie's tight, strong grip is his favourite; the perfect way their hands press together, like they were meant to fit. He can pick out a handful of Archie's friends by their tentative, uncertain touches, adolescent hands small and anxious against his skin, touching with their fingertips first, as though asking permission to be there. Mary holds his hand like she always has, fingers laced, still and warm and reassuring, as if nothing had ever changed, as if they were still married.  
  
The only other person who takes time to entwine their fingers with his is FP: his touch is the easiest to pick out, his hand huge and hot and restless in Fred’s palm. His fingers play with every inch of Fred’s skin as he sits with him, a thumb always rubbing over the back of his hand, tracing his knuckles, lacing and unlacing their fingers over and over. Hermione's hand is the opposite, slipping small and cool into his grasp and staying there without moving. Alice touches him rarely, but when she does she rests her hand maternally on top of his as if keeping it safe.   
  
His real mother squeezes all his fingers together like she's trying to break them off, a move that makes him remember being pulled to a stop at the edge of a busy intersection, lest he go running into the street and be lost to the nearest syrup truck. For a woman of seventy-six her grip is tremendous, but his mom is a champion bowler and leader of her neighbourhood running club, and her strength no longer surprises him. 

The hand in his now is none of these. The person holding his hand has slipped their fingers securely into his palm and is letting him do the gripping, the way his father used to.  _ Dad _ , he thinks faintly, through the haze of drugs, but he knows better than to voice it because dead was dead and people didn’t come back just because you missed them or wanted your hand held. 

He opens his eyes. 

For a moment he sees only the blonde hair and thinks faintly that it’s Alice, asleep at his bedside with one hand tucked securely into his. The idea is so odd that he’s relieved when she shifts in her sleep and he recognizes his sister’s face. 

Susan. He hadn’t identified her grip because she had yet to sit by his bedside holding his hand - she’d arrived in Riverdale at the same time as his mother and had let Mrs. Andrews do the hand-holding. Susan had only hugged, and hovered, and smothered him in apologies from his other three sisters who wanted to be there but couldn’t, because the four oldest Andrews children had scattered across the country and left only Fred here, like a marker of where they’d grown up.  

Fred had been grateful they hadn’t all dropped their lives to come see him disintegrate in this hospital room - Mary had brought his mother and he was unhappy enough with them both for allowing it.  His mom lived on the other side of the country now, and shouldn’t be using her money or energy making the trip. But part of him had never outgrown wanting to see her, and in secret he was grateful for it.

"Suze?" His voice is so small that he doesn’t expect it to carry, but her hand twitches a little in his and she wakes.    
  
"Hm?" She lifts her head sleepily off the mattress. 

_ You hold my hand like dad used to _ , he wants to say,  _ letting me hold onto your fingers.  _ But he doesn’t. 

“Where’s Archie?” Priorities, always. 

"Mom took Archie home.” Susan begins speaking almost at the same moment he does, as if anticipating the question. She scrubs her eyes sleepily with one hand. “Well, to your place. She's making him dinner."    
  
"When?" It’s far past dinnertime: the light is off in the room and there are long shadows on the floor. Susan squints at the dark windows.    
  
"Awhile ago."   
  
"What time is it?" This is the longest phrase he’s managed since he woke up, and it hurts in a dull, spreading way to speak. 

She lifts the wrist not holding his and shakes her hair out of her face to read the wristwatch. In the faint light the curtain of her hair glimmers briefly and settles. "One or two." 

It was four pm last he remembers. “Which one?” 

“I don’t know.” She grins sheepishly. “The battery’s dying.” 

“It doesn’t matter.” He’s speaking softly, as if lowering the volume of his voice will make it hurt less. "You should go too."    


She smiles, and squeezes his fingers again. The answer is wordless. She’ll stay.    


"Come lay down, then."    
  
"You got room for two in there?" 

“Yeah.” 

In the thin band of moonlight from the window, she squeezes herself carefully under the tangle of tubes and machines to climb into his bed. He helps her pull the covers high up over both of them, and the movement makes him feel small, like he’s a little kid making a fort. They’re pressed hip-bone to hip-bone, but there’s room. They fit.    


Susan wraps her arms around him, up top, over his sternum, where it won't hurt. He feels the ghost of her bare arms skim his ribs. "You are so thin, Freddie,” she murmurs sadly, pulling herself gently to him. “You are so small. My baby brother." she adds playfully, cupping his cheek. 

“I'm not anymore.” He says softly, reaching up and holding onto her fingers. “We got old, Suze. We're dad's age.”

“Oh, don’t be so morbid, Freddie.” She shifts softly next to him, scrapes blue jean material over his bare leg.  “Do you feel old?”

“I don't know. Older.”

“That's a good thing, Fred, you're  _ supposed _ to get older. Try to make it to old age okay?” She smooths comforting circles into his shoulder with her thumb, a wry little sideways smile on her lips. Even smiling hurts, but it comes easy. He knows she knows it’s not his first hospital room. 

“I don’t know if you remember this,” says Susan softly. “Do you remember when you were really small, and-” 

“I got clonked in the head with a baseball and almost died? I wasn't that young, like seven.”

“Your heart stopped.”

“For like, a second.”

Her honey blonde owes more to a box than the summer sun as of late, but it still smells the same when she leans against him, the comforting nectarine-and-sun of their long gone upstairs bathroom. Susan is what Tom Petty would have called an American girl, even at fifty, one of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, long-legged variety. Even now she's in blue jeans, her bare feet pressing cooly against the warm skin of his shin. Debbie and Susan were the only blondes in the family: Pam and Linda and Fred had been stuck with brown hair. 

"I know you're a homebody, Fred, but I want you to move out West with us.” Susan runs her fingers gently through his too-thin hair, brown like their dad's, caressing his scalp. “You and Archie. Get out of this town. At least think about it."    
  
"I can't uproot him in the middle of a school year."    
  
She almost laughs at that, but without humour. Her hand spreads gently up his breastbone to trace the jutting ridge of his clavicle, soothing. Fred gets his comfort through touch and she knows it. "I think this is a special circumstance."    
  
"Mary wanted to take him to Chicago."    
  
"You know I love Mary, Fred. I always have. But fuck what she wants. No one's taking your baby."   
  
"I'd live.” 

"Sure, you'd live. You always survive. But think about how it would feel."    


He doesn't want to. He knows how it would feel: like a black hole, a tugging, blinding pain at the very centre of him. Archie gone would be a total absence, a missing centre of gravity of each and every room in his house, forever. Patches of carpet and corners of armchairs vibrating with non-presence, like he had had a son once that had only now been suddenly swallowed into the air. And then one day it would soften and it would be like he had never had a son at all, and that would be the worst. 

He thinks he’s stopped breathing. Susan strokes his hair. "You are a good parent. I don't think anyone's told you that since that gun went off, but you are. You are such a good parent."    
  
Fred shakes his head slightly and she catches his face between her hands, voice fierce. "No, you  _ are _ . You do the best for him, you always have. You think he'd be better with Mary? That boys more loved and taken care of than any kid in the world. So you can't do everything. you're not perfect. No one's perfect. But you take such good care of him, Freddie, you do." 

His cheeks are suddenly wet, and an apologetic smile flickers onto her face, the charge leaving her voice. "I knew that would make you cry. I'm sorry." She rests her cheek back against him. “My sensitive brother.” 

Fred wraps his arms around her the best he can, the comforting weight of her, the obliging way she tucks her blonde cloud of hair against his cheek. There’s a childhood memory contained centrally in this scene: the two of them under the covers, the world outside. I’m sorry, he thinks dimly, thoughts directed at his absent son, you deserved siblings. You deserved this. 

“Freddie?” Her voice is soft, apologetic. "You're not staying here because dad's here, are you?" 

He pictures it again: a marker where their driveway had been, like a gravestone or a totem. THE ANDREWS FAMILY GREW UP HERE. That was him. 

"No. I just feel like-"   
  
"Like what"   
  
"Like somebody has to."    
  
" _ No _ . Nobody has to. We all left for a reason, Fred. You can find another small town. You can find another Pop's. You can find another Riverdale High. But for god's sake, take the kid and go."    
  
"My  _ work _ , Susie."    
  
"You can build things anywhere, Fred."    
  
"My company."    
  
"Arrangements can be made. You can sell it. You can move it." Her voice softens, moving a lock of hair off his temple. "I just want you safe. "   
  
"I'm a grown up, Susie."    
  
"No, you aren't." she whispers, laying her cheek again against his arm. "You're my baby brother. We're in our old house and dad's taking us to the drive in tonight." 

_ Stop _ , he almost says, but the want for it takes over - he holds onto her and the memory like someone drowning. He feels himself shake and she nestles closer to him on the same impulse with which she’d taken his hand, as if trying to press warmth into all of his body. He and Susan were rarely home at the same time, so his memories of nights like this one are all in foreign settings: the cottage of a family friend one August, the night he’d spent in her university town before her convocation, a motel on a late-summer family vacation. He’d always felt a special kind of awe for her, older and wiser than him and more beautiful, and he wants it back all at once, wants to cry into her hair and be nine. 

"He's a tough kid, Freddie." Susan can read his mind, or maybe she only knows that he’s always thinking about Archie. Susan was a parent too.    
  
"I don't want him to be a tough kid."    
  
"Dad used to say that about you, you know." She combs his hair off his cheek again. "He used to say to me: 'don't let Linny toughen him up.' He loved you because you were like Mom. He always said Debbie and Pam and Linny were like him, they were hard. But you and me were the dreamers. Especially you.” 

Fred tries to remember this. Susan had nine years on him and more to draw from: he finds himself stuck in memories of the senseless teenage disagreements that had punctuated his last years of living at home, the predictable tiffs over his lack of summer job or how long he kept his hair. He had understood that his father loved him unquestioningly, knew it in the fond way he smiled at him over dinner and the way his hand settled gently on his neck when they were watching baseball, long hair and summer job be damned, but his father was never one to mince words and he can recall no verbal confirmation that his dreaminess hadn’t driven his father absolutely crazy. Susan smooths the fabric of his hospital gown over his too-sharp ribcage and keeps talking.    
  
“Remember how hard he used to come down on you for wearing headbands all the time? And those long, God-awful flower print shirts like the world's youngest hippie. But he'd turn around and say to me how proud he was of you. For doing what you wanted and not giving a shit. I don't think he ever told you.” She half-shrugs. “He was always like that. Talk shit to your face, be sweet behind your back. With us girls, anyway. I guess he never passed up a chance to let you know you were his favourite. But he loved you for being sensitive. He loved that best about you." 

She finds his cold hand under the covers, squeezes it tightly between both of hers. He grips back. 

"Remember that time you wore Linny's skirt to school? Dad almost had a stroke in the morning. He tried to make you change but then once you left he turned to me, cause I was home then for whatever reason, and he said: 'good on him.' Just that: 'good on him.' Like you'd stolen a base in baseball or something. I've always remembered that. He was so proud of you, even if you drove him crazy sometimes. I know you think you used to fight, but he was proud of you for not giving in.” 

This is something he hasn’t heard before, and it fills him with a cold kind of sadness. He feels suddenly alone.    
  
“He used to worry about you, too. More than he worried about us. Remember the night you and FP had that big softball game, and it poured buckets and you were out until four in the morning, and you came in soaked? He was up the whole night waiting for you to come in. He told you you woke him up but he was lying." 

He does remember that, all in texture: the cold of his damp uniform, the hot slice of lightning outside the kitchen window, the greasy damp of his knees, his father with his arms folded, silhouetted in the kitchen light, radiating displeasure. The sharp sting of his absent, vicious, eighteen-year-old thought - god, i wish i lived alone, didn’t have to put up with this. This is all new information, too much of it. “Susan, I can’t-” 

Can’t talk about dad right now, he means to say, but his voice collapses there, and he thinks it’s more accurate, all encompassing: i can’t. I just can’t. listen, remember, reconcile. Pretend it doesn’t hurt. 

She leans up and kisses him on the cheek, where it’s wet. “All right,” she says. “It’s all right.” 

He wants to tell her it’s not fair she’d had nine more years with him, that Debbie had twelve, that he was cheated out of that borrowed time by the order of his birth. That she knew all this about the man they’d called dad and he was left in the dark, grasping at other people’s promises: he did believe in you, trust you, loved you best. 

“Fred, was that Hermione I saw earlier?” 

He remembers suddenly that Susan hasn’t seen his old friends in years. “Yeah.” 

“Your Hermione? The Hermione?” 

_ The _ Hermione. It strikes him as ironically funny, and he manages a struggling grin, if only because no one else in Riverdale, much less the whole state, probably had a name like that. “That’s the one.” 

“Loving-you's-a-man's-job-win-a-date-with-the-backstreet-boys-hands-down-your-pants-in-church Hermione?"    
  
Fred cracks a smile, a real one, the bright surfacing of a long-gone memory. "I forgot about that."    
  
"What, the church? That just proves you were the favourite. You two were acting so fucking virginal all night too, oh, we'll sleep in different bedrooms, like that was fooling anybody. And then in the morning, Mom asks Hermione to church like I knew she would, even though it's pretty clear the only scripture she's interested in is written on the inside of your Levi's. She was already plotting to marry you two off, that's why. And you two sat in the back row and I look over during the Hail Marys and you two are doing your own version of the holy communion."    
  
"Dad would have laughed."    
  
"Dad would have laughed," she confirms.    
  
"Remember how they used to bicker about the theory of evolution?"    
  
Susan picks it up easily. "And mom would say: 'we can't be evolved from monkeys, because there'd be no more monkeys left.' And dad would get in such a huff, and we'd all be eating our toast and trying not to laugh." 

It hurts less, now. He doesn’t know why. 

"When you were small -” offers Susan, “and I mean really small, when we still used to dress you up and carry you around, Debbie used to always say: 'i'm Fred’s favourite sister.' She thought she was oldest so she knew everything. And Mom would say, ‘No one plays favourites in this house,’ as if we didn’t all know you were everyone’s favourite. She let you get away with things I couldn’t even dream of.”    
  
"You've always been my favourite sister."    
  
"I know."   
  
"Oh, you know, do you?” He grins again, and the stabbing pain is worth it. “What makes you so sure?"

“You called me first." 

"Come again?"    
  
"When Mary lost the baby. You called me first." 

“Oh.” 

A machine beeps in the room. She leans up and kisses him on the cheek again, quickly, like bandaging a hurt, strokes his hair again as if in apology. The rattle of his breathing sounds loud in the silence. “You’re my favourite brother, too.” 

He’s her only brother. It’s an Andrews family joke.    
  
"Remember when you taped over Pam's high school graduation?"   
  
"Bruce Springsteen was on MTV."    
  
"She got you back, though. Didn't she ruin your baseball cards?"   
  
"Yeah she put them all in the shower and turned it on." 

Her laugh tickles his chest. "Dad used to complain that we never caught you with any porno mags. I said, he's using all the Bruce Springsteen album sleeves, that's why."    
  
"Suze, did Dad know-"    
  
"Did Dad know about your Springsteen fetish? You didn't exactly hide it."   
  
"No. Did Dad know I liked boys."    
  
She's silent for a moment. "I don't know how much, but he knew. One way or another, he knew."    
  
"You guys knew."    
  
"Me and Linny? Yeah. Don’t you remember we used to heckle you every time FP slept over?"    
  
"Did everyone know?"   
  
"Mom didn't."    
  
"I know. I told her after Dad died."    
  
She lays the back of her hand against his cheek. "Freddie, you're tired. And you're burning up."    
  
"I'm not tired."    
  
"You are. Go to sleep."    
  
The heart monitor beeps loudly to his right, and the sharp alien click of another machine follows it. Fred shakes his head. "I can't."    
  
"Was Archie born here?"    
  
"What?"   
  
"This hospital."    
  
"Yeah."   
  
"Think about that. It's not all bad.” 

“It’s still a hospital.”    
  
"Then we're not in a hospital.” She holds him tighter. “We're in my bedroom, and you're six, and I'm fifteen, and I'm reading to us out of Stories from the Twilight Zone but skipping all the scary parts.” 

His breath catches, and her thumb traces lines into his collarbone, like drawing a picture. He can see her sad smile without looking. "I knew that would make you cry."    
  
"Keep telling me."

“Okay, but try to sleep.” 

He closes his eyes obediently, and in the dark her hand slides again against his, thumb on the pulse point, three fingers tucked into the curve of his palm. She doesn’t clasp, just offers. Waits for him to finish the grip. 

Once upon a time, his dad used to hold his hand like this at busy intersections. 

He holds onto Susan’s fingers, and she squeezes his back. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Freddie's sisters are 
> 
> Debbie, b. 1963  
> Pamela, b. 1964  
> Susan, b. 1966  
> Linda, b. 1969 
> 
> for this story, Fred's born 1975 but 100% my math is off somewhere in there, just accept it


End file.
